Feb. 12, 2014

MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY / Heidi Gutman/MSNBC

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Sarah Palin changed what women view as possible about running for office. The tea party showed that losing an election does not mean losing the right to speak.

Those were two of the more surprising statements from Melissa Harris-Perry, host of a weekend show on MSNBC and an outspoken advocate for liberal causes. She spoke Tuesday night at Iowa State University.

I know, I know. Conservatives think Harris-Perry represents everything that’s wrong with the First Amendment’s right to free speech. Even some Democrats disagree with her at times, she said.

For example: “Democrats don’t like it when I say this, but I prefer that Clarence Thomas is on the Supreme Court than that the Supreme Court had no African-American justices,” she said. Not that she ever agrees with Thomas, she said, but he represents her understanding of democracy that people have the right to govern, not just to be governed.

I don’t agree with a lot of what Harris-Perry says, either. I might not have attended her lecture if I hadn’t assigned my class of journalism students to cover it. I generally prefer cable TV hosts who don’t see the humor in ridiculing a photograph of a former presidential candidate’s family. Harris-Perry has apologized repeatedly and profusely to Mitt Romney’s family and the viewing public for that, by the way, and she didn’t bring it up again in Iowa. Nobody else did, either.

But Harris-Perry’s lecture reminded me of the value of seeking out people and opinions that differ from my own. She made some thoughtful points about the role of women in politics and in history, a few of which I’d like to repeat.

Her comments about Palin, the 2008 vice-presidential nominee, were basically in the form of a back-handed compliment.

But there’s a serious message behind the joke. Here’s how Harris-Perry put it:

“Again, I’m not a fan of Sarah Palin’s policies, but the example of her candidacy launches a thousand Republican ships. She changes what women think is possible about when they can run for office, and that matters. She basically ran like a man. You know how many men run who are unqualified for office?”

Ask a man to run when he has a newborn baby at home, and he’s right there. Ask him to run even though he has a scandal in the family, no problem. “Usually, women are like, no, I’m imperfect, I’m insufficient, I can’t. She was like, yes. Here we go. In heels.”

It’s not a question of whether Palin was qualified or whether electing an unqualified woman is better than electing a man. The point is that women don’t have to keep holding themselves back from running for office because of family, flaws and fears. Those who have been trying to recruit more women to run for office in Iowa will appreciate the message — they’ve been making the same case to many a reluctant candidate.

Female models of leadership, particularly in the context of black history, often don’t look like leadership, Harris-Perry said. They look like martyrdom, suffering and mourning: Four black girls killed in a church bombing in Alabama; elderly black women and children suffering and dying in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; civil-rights widows Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz keeping alive the memories of their slain husbands.

“We don’t think of it as leadership, but in fact when women make themselves available to suffer, they actually shift movements in a way that it is impossible for men to do,” Harris-Perry said.

I’m not certain how I feel about the notion of leadership through victimhood. Perhaps it’s better than having no power at all.

Harris-Perry’s point about the tea party was that in a democracy, the winner does not get to silence the loser. That’s almost ironic, considering how effective tea party supporters have been in Congress at making the majority party dance to their tune.

“The whole notion of democracy is that you ought to lose without fearing that winners take all and you ought to win and know that you have not won all the goodies. That you always have to share in the context of democracy,” she said.

In an hour-plus speech and brief question-and-answer period, Harris-Perry also mimicked Kanye West, riffed on Michelle Obama’s bangs, castigated the NAACP for its late adoption of support for gay marriage rights and confessed that she can’t sing, to her apparent shame. In short, she was everything I expected, based on her TV reputation, and a lot more that I didn’t anticipate.

Perhaps her many critics would like to silence her (good luck with that), but they could learn something by listening.